Bad Behavior has blocked 329 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Powered by LifeType
I put our space heater on in front of them for a long time to no avail. Jon is home sick with a cold, so in the afternoon he decided to see what more he could do to thaw the pipes. (Noah and I were upstairs taking a nap.) He got the little bathroom space heater and propped it up in the ceiling of the basement. Then he went upstairs.
Jonathan stayed downstairs and decided it might be fun to cut the power cord of the heater with wire cutters. With a big spark, loud noise, burning plastic, gouged wire cutters and tripping circuit breaker, he learned that it is not so fun after all. He was scared, and came crying and running upstairs (stopping to climb up the workbench to put the tools away first!)
If he's going to take after Aunt Janet, I'd rather it be in music or math, or languages, or really anything else...
Yikes!!!
I'm glad he wasn't hurt!
Ugh, frozen pipes! And yikes for the little one cutting wires! That's probably on my top twenty list of parental fears--something involving wires. And yes, the list is very long.
It does seem to have been a good lesson - he is much more concerned about wires and wire cutters than he used to be.
Last night, I finally got the pipes thawed, and I purposely set the dishwasher to run in the middle of the night with the idea being that it would keep the pipes from being frozen, and it did work, though it doesn't use cold water, so that pipe was frozen this morning, even though I left the cupboard open. It appears to be freezing underneath one of the cabinets. I have heard bad things about heat-tape, but I am starting to think about it - seems like if it is low enough heat, there shouldn't be a problem with it.
I also opened a ceiling tile in the basement to let some more heat to the floor of the kitchen, and maybe that will help too.
You didn't mention my favorite part of the story (besides the fact that no one got hurt, of course). Afterwards, Jon and Jonathan talked calmly about the problem, then went back down together and fixed the cord. No yelling, no recriminations, just a lesson well learned and the damage repaired. It reminds me of my own father, who repaired the cord to our power hedge trimmers two or three times after I accidentally cut through it instead of the branches. Obviously the lesson wasn't nearly as impressive as Jonathan's, since I had to re-learn it a couple of times. Or maybe I'd have learned faster if Dad had taught me to do the repair, instead of just fixing it himself. He was also known to thaw frozen pipes with a blowtorch, not that I would recommend following that example. Have you tried leaving the water running slightly overnight? That worked during the Great Ice Storm of 1964 when our upstairs bathroom temperature dropped to 34 degrees and it was 4 degrees outside (admittedly warmer than your temperatures this morning).
By the way, the cold water in the kitchen sink started running a couple of hours ago.
As I understand freezing pipe fixes, leaving the water on (unless you leave it significantly running) doesn't affect whether it freezes or not, just whether the pipes burst due to not room to expand when it freezes.
Since our pipes seem to expand fine (fairly long flexible hoses for the sink, and before we moved the upstairs pipes, it was the soft copper, so I imagine they just expanded with the water), I haven't worried about leaving it running.
It seems like a large waste of water to leave it running, ie. not just dripping.
Also, for the first part of your comment, he did get a spank after we talked about it right at the beginning.
My only experience with keeping pipes from freezing occurred when we had -21 degrees (yes, in Indiana, and not counting wind chill). We did leave the cupboard doors open and the water running at barely a trickle, and it did work. Might be worth a try!